Recap: What Could This Week’s Shock Mean For The Ending Of ‘Girls’?

This is a recap of the latest episode of Girls. Spoilers!

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In a series with a more traditional narrative structure, major plot points — especially life-and-death major — are foreshadowed and echoed. They’re obvious in hindsight, if not glaringly so before they arrive. Certain rules of storytelling have trained us to look for clues to work out what will happen next. But Girls doesn’t always work this way.

Girls often sets up situations that other shows would turn into neat, predictable recurring arcs with clear morals — and spends energy and time introducing opaque but memorable characters (like Joy Bryant’s weirdo Poughkeepsie antiques-witch) who make an impression — and then has them serve no further purpose in the story. Its dedication to more realistic storytelling means it prefers to leave many things unresolved and isolated; their lessons are lost on the main characters, even if the potential resonance is frustratingly clear to the audience. (To borrow a phrase, they’re occasional hugging, very slow learning).

It means that the characters actually get away with a lot of things that other shows would drag out or punish them for. But this week, a few of those narrative chooks came home to roost.

The growing pattern of mistakes being repeated in this episode — from Hannah’s refusal to deal with her recurring UTIs (perhaps because, like many women, she’s learned to accept a certain level of pain as normal?), to Ray yelling at people who he knows are meaningful to him — initially looks like a simple indicator of final-season syndrome. But this episode packs in so many callbacks and loose ends (and even, arguably, the series’ most memorable guest star) that it starts to feel like a theme unto itself: how our past selves repeat on us, and how we return to our mistakes most reliably when we believe we’re past them.

Unexpected or unwanted pregnancy is one specific trope that the show has returned to at a number of points: from Jessa’s eventually-unnecessary abortion appointment in the pilot, and Caroline’s massive pre-natal personality shift and post-natal depression, to Adam and Mimi-Rose’s fight about her abortion. Lena Dunham’s recent tone-deaf comments seem to suggest that this might be a preoccupation for her personally — but isn’t it always a faint or glaring concern somewhere in your mind in your twenties?

If you’ve got a functioning oven, you’ve also got limited time to fire it up; if you have no plans to whip up a batch of buns any time soon or ever, people pester you about it anyway. Women are still being socially and culturally defined by their reproductive options or lack thereof, as Tracey Ullman’s pitch-perfect pseudo-Germaine Greer writer points out in the cold open — and that’s just when you have the privilege of control over your body and choices. There’s also the possibility of getting pregnant accidentally during a weekend fling with a surfing/water-skiing instructor, for example.

This week is not the first time the show has dealt with death directly — it skewed caustic and flippant after Hannah’s editor died, and theatrically bleak as Loreen and her sisters hovered around their mother’s deathbed. The twist of giving Ray two deaths to deal with in one day is clever and crushing; the death of the chatty regular after Ray dismisses him means there’s a giant DOOMED sign around Hermie’s neck once Ray starts in on him too. But because we’re used to Girls ignoring the standard techniques of foreshadowing major plot points, right up until the final moment of confirmation, there’s a Schroedinger-level tension: we don’t know if the show is going to play this straight or grant Ray a reprieve, so it feels both like a foregone conclusion and a fakeout at once.

Hermie’s cancer has been hanging around in the background for more than half the show’s run, and it was that news that seemed to kick off Ray’s three-season arc of mopey aimlessness. Hermie’s right that no matter how many self-help books he reads, Ray’s still not focused enough — nor does he possess enough genuine self-esteem — to stop fucking the regulation hottie he clearly can’t stand anymore, find a path to stick to and aim higher. If Ray gets a happy ending, it could be because his friend and mentor’s death will break that cycle he’s been in for so long, and push him along the road.

At the other end of the self-esteem continuum, the increasingly-less-sustainable Adam and Jessa dynamic has now deteriorated to the point where they’re mythologising themselves, preferably through a creative outlet that gives their submerged, nervous, guilty energy around their relationship the same kind of focus as Hannah’s column about her experience of it. In fact, it’s hard not to wonder if Jessa’s backsliding too; her bed-bouncing energy feels like a callback to her coke-fuelled manias during her fling with Richard E. Grant. Adam just seems fired up from rage-quitting the Russian mafia movie; she’s giving off sparks like a frayed wire.

Obviously their movie about a love triangle of borderline-unstable jerks sounds terrible, even if they’re able to see that shooting in black-and-white is a bridge too far. Their apparent lack of self-awareness doesn’t just make for a good laugh as Jessa proudly diagnoses her young self with sociopathy then immediately proclaims she’s grown out of it. It stops them realising how obsessed they still are with Hannah, how they haven’t moved past the knock-down drag-out brawl they had about her in last season’s finale, even as they spend their evening sitting in her stairwell, waiting to impress her with their big idea.

“Do whatever you want,” Hannah tells them dully, still in shock after finding out she’s pregnant to Paul-Louis. She might even mean it; after all, she’s told her side of the story. But what does Hannah want? It’s jarring to suddenly be considering the possibility of yet another lead female character ending her show’s final season with a pregnancy. Kids are great and all but, as the ersatz Germaine says, you don’t need them, and suggesting that reproduction in and of itself makes for a happy ending is a desperately tired trope. It’s not unfair to hope for more from this show, if not from others with an established history of weirdly retrograde gender politics.

But there’s nothing to clearly suggest an abortion is on the cards. Hannah’s rebuke to Patrick Wilson’s clumsy, condescending attempts at help and comfort her — as if to pull herself away from the chattering, oversharing kid who spent the weekend with him years earlier — might not be just a kneejerk reaction.

It’s an unexpectedly straightforward storytelling tack for the show to take in its final season, even more so after the varied tone of the first few episodes. For all its disdain for neatly serialised plotting, we’ve got six episodes left in which Girls, like Hannah and Ray, has been set on a definitive path — some things are just too big to leave unresolved.

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Girls is on Showcase at 8.30pm Wednesday nights.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh. Read her Girls recaps here.